Curiosity Over China's Irish Interest

BEIJING — Cultural clichés somersaulted last weekend when Vice President Xi Jinping of China, the man expected to be the country’s next leader, told the people of Ireland on a visit there: Cheer up!

The irony of a representative of what are perhaps the world’s greatest pragmatists telling perhaps the world’s greatest optimists to buck up wasn’t lost on the Irish, winded by one of the worst economic crises in debt-struck Europe.

Typically, they made a joke out of it: “The Chinese are here — look busy” ran a headline in The Irish Times on Saturday, the day Mr. Xi arrived for his three-day visit, midpoint in a tour that began in the United States and continued in Turkey.

Yet the question on the minds of many was: Why did the man who may become one of the most powerful leaders on earth choose Ireland for his only stop in the European Union on his “coming out” tour?

A key reason may be a kind of free-trade pilgrimage — to the Shannon Free Zone, first visited by Jiang Zemin, the former Communist Party chief but then a vice minister of the State Imports and Exports Administration, in 1980.

Chinese officials often say the free-trade area, set up in 1959, was a model for their own successful Special Economic Zones in southern China, which powered economic reform here starting in 1980. China now wants to upgrade its industries, and the high-tech Shannon Free Zone is of interest as a regional model, Irish commentators said.

Other leaders who have visited Shannon include two prime ministers, Wen Jiabao and Zhu Rongji, and two vice prime ministers, Huang Ju and Zeng Peiyan. During his own visit, Mr. Xi requested a personal briefing from Dr. Vincent Cunnane, the chief executive of Shannon Development, which runs the zone, the company said in a statement.

Another reason to visit Ireland may be what Jonas Parello-Plesner, a senior policy fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations, called “the omni-directional diplomacy of China.”

“When the Foreign Ministry and the State Council plan senior leaders’ trips they try to cover widely, including small and insignificant countries,” Mr. Parello-Plesner said in an e-mail.

China also wants to enhance ties with individual European nations — the European Union is its leading trading partner — and increase investment in a weakened continent.

Mr. Xi’s delegation of 150 officials and businessmen attended a banquet at the Bunratty Castle in County Clare, quaffed Irish coffee at a family-run dairy in the village of Sixmilebridge (where a newborn calf was named after him), visited the precipitous Cliffs of Moher, whacked a sliotar with a hurley (a ball with a hurling stick) on the hallowed ground of the Gaelic Athletic Association at Croke Park in Dublin, watched a performance of “Riverdance” and signed trade, investment and education deals in Dublin Castle.

Falun Gong and Tibetan rights advocates demonstrated, but in small numbers. Most striking was a one-woman protest at the Cliffs of Moher, where the police intercepted Sinead Ni Ghairbhith as she walked toward Mr. Xi holding a “Free Tibet” placard and shouting “Stop Killing Innocent Tibetans!”

Mostly, however, Mr. Xi charmed wherever he went, urging the Irish to trade and invest more deeply in China and holding out the promise of job creation in a nation struggling with 14 percent unemployment.

Specifically, he told the Irish and other Europeans not to “talk down” their economies, in comments headlined by the state news media in China, where the visit was prominently covered.

“China does not think one should ‘talk down’ or ‘short’ to Europe, because we believe that the difficulties facing Europe are temporary, and the E.U. and the governments and people across Europe have the ability, the wisdom, and the means to solve the sovereign debt problem and achieve economic recovery and growth,” Mr. Xi said in a written interview with The Irish Times, published on Saturday.

Over the last 15 years, Ireland achieved something that fascinates Chinese officials — a transition from a poor, agricultural nation to a rich, high-tech one.

Even as Mr. Xi’s Air China 747-400 landed in Shannon, a statement by him was distributed to waiting journalists describing Ireland as “a success story of moving, in a short period of time, from an agro-pastoral economy to a knowledge economy.”

Mr. Parello-Plesner pointed to another important factor: “It is the last of the crisis-hit E.U. countries that hasn’t gotten a senior leader visit,” he said.

In January, China made its first direct investment in Britain’s creaking infrastructure, The Guardian reported, when its $410 billion sovereign wealth fund, China Investment, bought an 8.68 percent holding in Kemble, the privately owned group that controls Thames Water, a utility company, in a deal analysts valued between £600 million and £700 million, or about $940 million and $1.1 billion.

Also in January, the privately held Sany Heavy Industry, a Chinese machinery manufacturer, together with the Chinese private equity firm Citic, bought the German pump maker Putzmeister Holding, in a deal worth €360 million, or almost $480 million, according to Xinhua, the state-run news agency.

In December, the state-controlled China Three Gorges Corp. bought 21 percent of the Portuguese utility company EDP for €2.7 billion, Reuters reported.

Ireland, with just 4.6 million people, is one of the few nations to run a trade surplus with China. That intrigues the Chinese.

Yet there was little talk of a more troubling parallel — economic bubbles.